Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 01, 2003 10:24 PM
To complete the thought on planned obsolensence...
Take a Word processor - for most people, there is no need to upgrade a word processor. There won't be any new features that will come out that you will need. But a proprietary company can you push you along because they can change the file format and more importantly drop support for the older version. That means shoudl you have a bug, it won't get fixed except by upgrading.
Look at the Open Source side now - changes to underlying document formats would be shunned as people want compatibility. They would only be undertaken with extreme thought that produced a need to do so. Bugs would be fixed almost as fast as tehy were disovered... So the user chooses to upgrade to fix a problem (or potential problem), not because support will evaporate or the document format would be changing on a whim.
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Re:Some points I would've mentioned
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 01, 2003 10:24 PMTo complete the thought on planned obsolensence...
Take a Word processor - for most people, there is no need to upgrade a word processor. There won't be any new features that will come out that you will need. But a proprietary company can you push you along because they can change the file format and more importantly drop support for the older version. That means shoudl you have a bug, it won't get fixed except by upgrading.
Look at the Open Source side now - changes to underlying document formats would be shunned as people want compatibility. They would only be undertaken with extreme thought that produced a need to do so. Bugs would be fixed almost as fast as tehy were disovered... So the user chooses to upgrade to fix a problem (or potential problem), not because support will evaporate or the document format would be changing on a whim.
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